Tuesday, July 15, 2008

'Tony and Gordon are good friends, I like both of them,' he says. Blair, he insists, is a very proficient guitar player. 'We've jammed.' Brown, he says, is much more personable in private than he appears in public. 'Gordon has too many people telling him to be serious. In fact he is very contagious and infectious. He should show that side more often. People would respond.'

Frankly, the idea of Gordon Brown chuckling his way through Prime Minister's Questions like Vernon Kay is certain to get a response. Still, Gordon could do worse than listen to Robin - after all, it's not like the Bee Gees come across like po-faced humour vacuums, is it?

Gibb also shows the paper round his house:

'The Bishops decided Joan of Arc's fate in the chapel here. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed here in 1533 on one of their progresses. Oh, and Baroness Sophie Wenham conducted her affair with William IV here,' he rhymes off. 'There's a very old set of stone steps outside that the Baroness used to climb into her carriage. She was short. Dwina uses them now to climb into the Range Rover. I like that kind of continuity, too: the melding of the old and the new.'

Not, of course, that Gibb has lost sight of his roots. Oh no. Because the kids today...

'I can remember my dad sitting under a 40-watt bulb counting pennies, trying to make them last until Friday. The evening meal was a six-penny bag of chips divided among us all for chip butties. We had bread soaked in milk and sprinkled with sugar for cereal. But kids don't question that.

... they don't know they're born, do they?

Mind you, the way his good chum Gordon is handling the economic mess, it's probable that kids are going to start gathering on the Range Rover steps outside his house yelling "a bag of chips between you all? We're lucky to get half a portion of potato peelings for the entire street..."